Six Years Later

My husband and I just celebrated out sixth wedding anniversary this year. I know six years of marriage, living together for seven, does not seem like a significant amount of time. However, the past few years has made me realize how much lives can change in such a short period of time and as a result why so many marriages fizzle out while still in their infancy.

I am thankful every single day to have my husband by my side as my best friend, my biggest supporter, and my strength in hardship. However, delving into our marriage six years ago, I had no idea what marriage was really about. We were in love, we made each other laugh, we loved spending time together, but how could we possibly know what we were really getting into?

When my husband and I first met, like so many other couples, our hobbies were aligned. We loved dancing late into the night, eating exotic foods (the more exotic the better), going to the movies, cooking and making up signature cocktails, and sleeping half the day away on weekends.

And then life happened.

We got jobs that required early mornings and staying up half the night wasn't so easy. We had a baby which meant sleeping in and watching movies all day was out of the question. And eating exotic foods in hip restaurants wasn't the relaxing experience it was in our early marriage with a kid that didn't have the same interest in more intense flavors and textures when it came to dining. And those days caring for a baby meant that things like cooking and making up cocktails (hello breastfeeding) just weren't realistic. Suddenly, our hobbies we enjoyed together we no longer feasible.

And this is where things in our marriage started to shift. We needed to redefine "us" with the demands of jobs and kids and all the intricacies of life.

And somehow we emerged from our young and carefree marriage as a couple that found completely new, but equally (or more exciting) hobbies that we enjoyed together. We found a true love for the outdoors, and playing poker. We started enjoying mornings drinking coffee together and chatting even when it meant chugging it side by side because we were running late. We started discussing the design of our backyard and found joy in landscaping together. We are not at all the same people that got married in 2010. We have different hobbies, different priorities, different lives than that young naïve couple.

But we were so very lucky that we find ourselves just as compatible with each other as the day we first met. Our lives look so drastically different, but we are still one another main priority.  There is a deeper sense of togetherness after spending the last six years of marriage supporting each other during our hardest most unlovable moments. There is a stronger sense of unity after changing so very much and watching our lives unfold in ways we never anticipated and through it all we always put one another first.